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LETTING GO AND MOVING ON BY JAMES OH

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MINDSET SHIFT: EMPLOYEE TO ENTREPRENEUR

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Hi!Some of you may know by now I have intended to publish Ebook with some of my writings. In this connection, I have read the article with so much excitement and hope you will like it too. Who knows, you may have similar interest as mine.

Even if you do not have such an interest currently, it does not mean that you will not have it in the future. Having this in mind, I rather chose to blog it out to excite us as well. I do not have such an experience to comment on it. What I need is perhaps some feedbacks from you especially those willing to share some of their experience here.

Better still, if anyone is willing to collaborate with me to publish an Ebook on any matters which you and I have the common interests. As you know, I always love to hear from you so that we can explore all means to make the proposal feasible and beneficial to both parties.

My experience tells me that through brainstorming and discussion, we can always put the ideas to work. Through constantly shaping and polishing this idea, it will eventually shine so long as we do not give up such a hope. Let our endurance and patience complete the task. We will be able to produce a masterpiece at the end of the day.

I do hope you are by now you feel excited and are willing to give yourself a try, as I do. Please do put forward your comment should you have any other idea, proposal or experience where you like to share here. Thank you in advance.

Every day I receive multiple requests from authors around the world who are looking for assistance or more information on how to self-publish an ebook.

And the answer today is very different than when our Publish Your Own Ebooks website started back in 2003.

Then, your best option was to get your ebook into PDF and start selling it from your own web site. While you can and should still do that today, if you want to be taken seriously as an independent author then you must also make your ebooks available at mainstream ebook stores such as Amazon Kindle Store that have emerged in recent years.

I’m very close to releasing a new ebook self-publishing guide but until it is ready I wanted to post a quick overview of the ebook self-publishing process and some of your options.

If you want to publish your own ebook then you need to consider the main online ebook stores where readers are buying and downloading ebooks. The four big stores right now are Amazon Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble Nook Books, Apple iBookstore, and Sony Reader Store. There are a few others to consider, but let’s keep this discussion to these four.

How to Get Your Ebook into these Stores?

Each of the major ebook stores has a portal for publishers to upload and manage their books. Remember as an indie author you are the author and the publisher.

You can choose to go to each store and publish your ebook directly or you can go through a distributor, sometimes called an ‘aggregator’.

An aggregator typically converts your manuscript into multiple formats and distributes your ebook to one or more stores on your behalf.

Some of the ebook aggregators commonly used by authors include Smashwords, BookBaby, and LuLu. They earn their income by a combination of upfront fees and annual fees for each ebook, or a percentage of the sales revenue from your ebook.

The process for publishing directly is different for each store and many authors use a combination, publishing directly to some stores while using an aggregator for the others.

Why Use an Aggregator?

One of the main reasons to use an ebook aggregator is to get assistance with converting your manuscript into the correct format. Amazon sells ebooks in their own proprietary Kindle format, AZW while the other stores use the EPUB format. There are sometimes complications encountered while trying to convert your manuscript from Microsoft Word into the appropriate format.

You may also decide to use an aggregator because you can’t meet the requirements to submit directly. Sony encourages indie authors to submit through an aggregator. Some stores require you to have a U.S. Tax ID or U.S. bank account if you want to publish directly. And in Apple’s case you need to submit from a Mac computer. Using an aggregator is a way to work around these obstacles.

Why Publish Directly?

Generally speaking it makes sense to deal directly if you can because you will save on costs and more of the profit from your ebooks will end up in your pocket.

If you are familiar with HTML you can probably handle the necessary formatting to successfully convert your manuscript to the appropriate ebook formats.

Getting Ready to Publish

Whether you publish directly or through an aggregator you will need to gather some important information for the submission process:

• Book Title

• Book Description – you need a professional-looking book description.

• Price – decide on the price that you will charge. Sometimes different prices result in different royalty percentages so choose carefully.

• Territories – you need to know which geographical territories you hold the rights for your ebook. If your ebook is an unpublished work then most likely you still hold rights for all territories.

• ISBN number. You need an ISBN number at some ebook stores but not at others.

ISBNs for ebooks, ebook covers and pricing are all important topics which will be covered in detail in other posts.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is only a very brief overview of the self-publishing process and some of your options. I’ll go into more detail in future posts and be sure to watch out for our new ebook self-publishing guide which will be available here soon.

Please, if you found this post helpful, take a moment to share the link to it via Twitter, Facebook or your favorite social media buttons below.

About the Author

Gary McLaren is a self-published author and the publisher of Publish Your Own Ebooks. He is also editor of Worldwide Freelance Writer a weekly email newsletter for freelance writers with around 29,000 subscribers.

James Oh

Skype me at james.oh18

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